The 'Court of the Agreement' (Tribunal de…

Johann Patkul has been the mainstay of the confederates throughout the earlier, unluckier days of the Great Northern War.

He had picked up the Scottish general George Benedict Ogilvie at Vienna in 1702 and enlisted him in Peter’s service.

The same year, he exchanges the Saxon for the Russian service, seeing no profit from serving such a master as Augustus.

Peter is glad enough to get a man so famous for his talents and energy, but Patkul speedily belies his reputation, as his knowledge is too local and limited.

Charles XII conquers Warsaw in May.

Vladika Danilo, who works particularly hard to unite Montenegrin tribes and clans believes that blood feuds and converts to Islam are as great a danger to Montenegro as are the Ottoman Turkish forces.

In order to "cleanse Montenegro of Turkish spirit", and to "cleanse malice from sheepfold" so that "we can regain as knights our freedom which is covered with scraps by the foreign dogs", Danilo organizes the legendary mass slaughter of those who had converted to Islam (the “Montenegrin Vespers” of Christmas Eve, 1702), triggering subsequent Ottoman reprisals.

England’s first regular daily newspaper, the Daily Courant, is published in 1702.

Commencing from Fleet Street, the paper consists of a single page with two columns.

Its founder, Edward Mallet, advertises that he intends to publish only foreign news and will not add any comments of his own, supposing other people to have "sense enough to make reflections for themselves."

The Company of Scotland had sent out another ship but it was lost at sea.

Not being able to afford the cost of fitting out yet another ship, the Annandale had been hired in London with the intention of trading in the Spice Islands, but the East India Company had had it seized on the grounds that the venture was a contravention of their charter.

This provokes uproar in Scotland, greatly aided by the inflammatory rhetoric of the company's secretary, and relentless enemy of the English, Roderick MacKenzie.

Villebon had made Baptiste captain of a small coast guard vessel and captain of the Port Royal militia.

Baptiste is protecting Acadian fishing interests off of Acadia when he is captured in 1702 and again imprisoned in Boston on the eve of Queen Anne's War.

During Queen Anne's War, Queen Anne is reported to have ordered that no prisoners are to be exchanged and that Baptiste is to be hanged, because he is an officer of the garrison of Port Royal who had been made prisoner during peacetime, and who had then failed to recover his freedom, on the ground of his being a pirate.

On hearing this, Governor of Plaisance (Placentia), Newfoundland Jacques-François de Monbeton de Brouillan had sent an express messenger to Boston, to declare to the governor that the he will retaliate if Baptiste is killed.

This saves Baptiste's life.

The Province of Pennsylvania has grown so large by 1704, that their representatives want to make decisions without the assent of the Lower Counties.

The two groups of representatives began meeting on their own, one at Philadelphia, and the other at New Castle.

Penn and his heirs remain proprietors of both and always appoint the same person Governor for their Province of Pennsylvania and their territory of the Lower Counties.

The fact that Delaware and Pennsylvania share the same governor is not unique.

New York and New Jersey from 1703 to 1738, will share a governor.

Massachusetts and New Hampshire also share a governor for some time.

Southeastern native tradition relates that a race of giants, who were a peaceable people engaged in agriculture, once inhabited Yazoo county and other lands on the Yazoo river.

They were annihilated by the fierce Yazoos, who invaded and took forcible possession of their lands.

There is an oral tradition that the Chickasaw came from the West over the Mississippi river and had waged a war of extermination against the Yazoo and other tribes, and that the Yazoo warriors had fought desperately until the last of their race was slain.

By treaty, the Chickasaw had taken as their share of the conquest all the lands along the Yazoo river and many of the counties east of that river.

The Choctaws were in possession of part of this country when it was first discovered by the white man, though the Yazoos were not exterminated, as their name appears on many of the earliest maps of this part of the country.

French explorer La Salle had named the Yazoo River in 1682 as "Rivière des Yazous" in reference to the Yazoo tribe living near the river's mouth.

The exact meaning of the term is unclear.

One long held belief is that it means "river of death".

Nothing is definitely known concerning the Yazoo language, believed to be related to Tunica, a language isolate.

Father Antone Davion, of the Quebec Seminary of Foreign Missions, had in 1699 established a mission among the Tunica.

He also reached out to allied tribes, such as the Taensa.

The Yazoo, however, were, like the Chickasaw, under the influence of the English traders from Carolina.

Yazoo warriors aid certain of the Koroa in killing Father Nicholas Foucault and three French companions in 1702.

The tribe's leaders have the murderers executed; the seminary temporarily withdraws Father Davion from the area.

Ships from Fort Maurepas arrive at Twenty-Seven Mile Bluff in January, 1702, to build Fort Louis de la Mobile (future Mobile, Alabama) to become the capital of French Louisiana.

English and Spanish colonization efforts in southeastern North America had begun coming into conflict as early as the middle of the seventeenth century.

The English founding of the Province of Carolina in 1663 and Charles Town (present-day Charleston, South Carolina) in 1670 had significantly raised tensions with the Spanish who had long been established in Florida.

Traders and slavers from the new province have penetrated into Spanish Florida, leading to raiding and reprisal expeditions on both sides.

Carolina's governor, Joseph Blake, had in 1700 threatened the Spanish that English claims to Pensacola, established by the Spanish in 1698, would be enforced.

Carolina traders such as Anthony Dodsworth and Thomas Nairne have established alliances with Creeks in the upper watersheds of rivers draining into the Gulf of Mexico, who they supply with arms and from whom they purchase slaves and animal pelts.

The Spanish population of Florida at this time is fairly small.

Since its founding in the sixteenth century, the Spanish have set up a network of missions whose primary purpose is to pacify the local native population and convert them to Roman Catholicism.

In the Apalachee region (roughly present-day western Florida and southwestern Georgia), there were fourteen mission communities with a total population in 1680 of about eight thousand.

Many, but not all, of these communities are populated by the Apalachee; others are from different tribes that have migrated southward to the area.

The Spanish have a policy of not arming these natives with muskets, and the Apalachee missions have suffered from English and Creek raids in 1701.

Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville, the French founder of Mobile in January 1702, warns the Spanish commander at Pensacola that he should properly arm the Apalachees and engage in a vigorous defense against English incursions into Spanish territory.

D'Iberville even offers equipment and supplies for the purpose.